Inspiring reading for anyone who has ever dared to dream the impossible.
A celebrated endurance swimmer’s account of her life in the water and the attempts that led to her successful 2013 swim from Cuba to Florida.
Nyad’s future as a swimming star seemed fated. On her fifth birthday, her stepfather revealed that the last name he had given her not only meant water nymph, but also champion swimmer. Four years later, her mother pointed across the Straits of Florida and observed that the island that produced the culture Nyad had fallen in love with was so close “you could almost swim there.” She began training at age 10 and was soon competing at national championships. As much as she loved swimming for the highs it gave her, it was also an activity that helped her overcome the trauma of sexual abuse she faced from both her father and, later, a trusted swimming coach. By the time she had graduated high school, Nyad was a world-class swimmer, but she missed qualifying for the 1968 Olympics. She turned to open water marathon swimming in her early 20s. Fascinated by the idea of crossing from Florida to Cuba, she made one unsuccessful attempt to navigate the dangerous waters between Cuba and Key West in 1978; two years later, she ended her swimming marathon career to become a sports broadcaster and journalist. In 2010, at age 60, she began the first of four more attempts to swim between Cuba and Florida. Three years later, wearing a special protective suit and mask to protect against jellyfish stings, she managed the crossing in 53 hours. What makes Nyad’s story so remarkable, beyond the harrowing trials she faced at sea—unpredictable currents and weather, deadly sea animals—is the strength of a resolve that would not admit defeat and knew no boundaries. “Whatever your Other Shore is,” she writes, “whatever you must do…you will find a way.”
Inspiring reading for anyone who has ever dared to dream the impossible.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-35361-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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